Tag: Arizona

Rude Pundit: Hey Right Wing, How’s That Ginning Up the Masses Thing Working for Ya Now?

Trish

For those of us following the coverage of the mass shooting aimed at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords who are sick of the false equivalency arguments (“But what about Daily Kos?”), the bending over backward denials (“They were surveyors marks, not gun scope sights”), and pleas by the right not to rush to judgment (like they do with every ginned up news cycle concerning the NPRs and Van Joneses of the world), The Rude Pundit offers some relief. He is calling out the same folks as the sheriff of Pima County did — those who earn a living inflaming the American people.

Rude Pundit: ‘Gosh, it’s just wrong to lump you all together, to stereotype you all as criminals in waiting. Like, you know, you have done with Muslims since September 11, 2001’

He goes one further, though, by including the viewers and listeners and readers who indulge those leaders, who drive up their ratings, and who ultimately pay their salaries. And if you are among them, The Rude Pundit leaves you nowhere to hide.

Following are excerpts from what could have been called, “Dear Right-Wingers: We Reject Your Every Attempt to Evade Blame” but which is, instead, the much better titled, “Dear Right-Wingers: You Are All Muslims Now.”

How you must have heaved in relief when you saw that it would be quite easy to portray Jared Lee Loughner as a raving psychopath, an effort that’s helped a great deal by the apparent truth, which is that Jared Lee Loughner is a raving psychopath…

Now, ah, yes, now, lovely right-wingers, you could defend yourself. You could work yourselves into a huff about how unjustly you were accused of driving this obviously disturbed individual into an act of calculated, cold-blooded violence. But that’s because you’re sitting there in your shit-filled underpants, thinking, “I don’t believe in violence. I don’t approve this. I hope the government doesn’t try to crack down on us.”

So, welcome, assholes, because you are Muslim now.

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Verbatim

Trish

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry…People tend to “pooh-pooh” this business about all this vitriol we hear enflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.

Pima County, Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, answering the question he was asked repeatedly in the wake of the terrorist attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Az.) that claimed six lives. The question was, “Why did it happen?”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Caught Lying Again – This Time about Her GOP-Style Death Panels for the Poor

Jon Ponder

Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer made news earlier this year when she claimed that the deserts in her state were littered with headless bodies — corpse of the victims of bloodthirsty illegal aliens who were crossing the border to wreak havoc on Arizonans. And though that claim was proven to be false, she never admitted she had lied.

In an interview on with Greta Van Susteren on Fox this week, Brewer has been caught lying again. This time, she has falsely claimed that Arizona is continuing to pay for life-saving transplant operations for state residents who can’t afford them:

GOV. JAN BREWER: It’s part of the Cadillac program that Arizona has. Even your private insurance don’t cover a lot of those procedures. A lot of those transplants are being provided in the state of Arizona.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: By the state of Arizona or privately?

BREWER: By the state of Arizona. We provide heart transplants, liver, kidney transplants, pancreas and kidney.

OLBERMANN: The state is absolutely not providing a liver transplant to Francisco Felix or a heart transplant to Randy Sheppard.

Rough transcript from MSBNC:

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GOP AZ Gov Brewer, Legislature Kill Transplant Funding for Uninsured – Republicans’ ‘Death Panel’ Selects Who Will Die Based on Income

Jon Ponder

Faced with the need to cut government budgets, Republicans reflexively start with programs for the poor, the ill, the elderly and children. In Arizona last year, the state’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer — best remembered for pushing the state’s “papers please” anti-immigrant law and then getting caught lying when she asserted that the Arizona deserts were littered with headless bodies — and the GOP state legislature chose to cut a $5 million state program that provided transplants for uninsured Arizonans.

Arizona Gov. Brewer and the GOP legislature used $1.7 million in Stimulus money just last year to repair the roof of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

These Republicans could have covered the shortfall by directing funding from the Stimulus for this life-saving program, but chose instead to spend over $1 million in Stim money to repair the roof of a sports stadium. What’s worse, had they applied the Stim money to save the transplant program for the uninsured, the state would have been eligible for an additional $15 million in matching funds from the federal government.

During the debate over health care reform, insurance company lackeys like Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin floated the lie that a beneficial aspect of the legislation — its coverage of the costs of living wills and end-of-life counseling — was something evil: a “death panel” of bureaucrats who would decide whether patients were too ill or elderly to receive certain procedures, even if the procedures might save the patients’ lives.

The GOP’s Fox channel promoted the death panel allegation so heavily that a poll during the debate found that about three-quarters of Fox viewers believed the lie to be true. Faced with the outrage ginned up by the Republicans’ pernicious lying, Democrats removed coverage of end-of-life counseling from the law.

While this represented only a small victory for the giant private health-care corporations, whose multi-billion dollar annual profits were left untouched, it was a big defeat for middle-class and poor Americans who will continue to have to pay out of pocket for counseling during what it arguably the most difficult time in anyone’s life.

But the McCaughey-Palin-Fox death claim was a lie — those death panels were not real. What the Republicans in Arizona have done is real — and it is eerily the same thing they falsely accused Democrats of doing: letting government bureaucrats choose whom should live or die. And, tellingly, the criteria of the GOP death panels is typically Republican: Income level. People in need of transplants who are ineligible to buy private insurance or who can’t afford it, will not be covered.

Because of the GOP death panel law, about 100 people in need of transplants are facing death today in Arizona. In the video above, Keith Olbermann interviewed two of them, both fathers of young children.

Rough transcript from MSNBC, with some corrections:

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